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Re: [OM] It'sPi Day!--now Day after Pi Day!-- Mandatory list assignments

Subject: Re: [OM] It'sPi Day!--now Day after Pi Day!-- Mandatory list assignments.
From: Chris Trask <christrask@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 15 Mar 2016 17:22:15 -0700 (GMT-07:00)
Cc: usher99@xxxxxxx
     There was an episode of Star Trek where Spock detrmined that the ship's 
computer had been compromised, owing to it making the same fatal error while 
playing 3-dimensional chess.  Spock regains control of the computer by having 
it compute the value of pi to the last significant digit.

>
>Marnie read it and liked it. I leafed through it.  Despite Marnie's 
>efforts to have me be more rounded, am too much of a square peg to read 
>that. The edges are a bit nicked and perhaps even a bit of dry rot has 
>set in, but no other changes.
>
>Mandatory read for this special day (to those interested) is the article 
>that appeared in the New Yorker, "The Mountains of Pi" by Richard Preston. 
>It is a fascinating tale of the Chudnovsky brothers' quest to calculate 
>and explore Pi to trillions of digits. 
>They are a combination  of number theorists and computer scientists.  The 
>Leibniz series has been known for hundreds of years and it is wondrous 
>but mysterious how a simple series of rational numbers can converge on a 
>simple ratio from a circle.
>They did not use that algorithm at all as it exhibits nonlinear convergence 
>and is very inefficient even with conversion acceleration transformation 
>techniques.  They developed an algorithm named after them ( that can be 
>coded in just a few lines  that ferociously converges on pi, providing 
>accurate digits swiftly.    
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chudnovsky_algorithm
>
>http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1992/03/02/the-mountains-of-pi
>
>I would also assign viewing the low budget film "Pi" from 1998--made 
>for <70K.  Marnie and I saw it in Cambridge when it was released.  I bet 
>one could stream it  from somewhere for very little.  
>Very off beat and a bit disturbing, and I recall liking it more than 
>Marnie.
>
>As I do have a teaching appointment and a Professorship , I feel free 
>giving out homework. ;-)
>

Pi-eyed Chris
-- 
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